Lark

Abstract

Lark Corey Marks (bio) A stone lodged in the boy’s throat.Why had he even taken it in his mouth?Hard to remember now—something about its smell, like rain. Somethingabout the open field, a distant song,a sense of the day’s never-endingness. On a lark, his mother would say.He’d moved the stone inside his cheek,along his teeth, pressed it against the roof of his mouth like candy,though it tasted of dirt and ozone.It was hard to imagine being on a lark— such a small thing. The size of his fist,though finer boned. In the story his motherread when she used to read to him, birds were caught in branches paintedwith glue. The birds would settleand then exhaust themselves battering against the air that wouldn’t opento them anymore. He imaginedplastic bags snapping in wind. And now he felt like a tree filledwith larks, his whole body branchedwith panic, lashing and lashing. Meadowlarks lived in the field, he’dseen them skitter in low arcs away.Not true larks at all, though [End Page 117] it was hard to think of them as a kindof blackbird with their yellow chestsand brown-stippled backs. Still, that’s what his book saidwhen it mattered to him once.Who named these things? How did they mistake so much?He didn’t like his own name—something an old man would be called. His parents were old. The dayfelt old. His mouth tastedlike the ringing inside a bell. And how little he filled his name,the only one he’d ever own—it strained away from him. Beyond, names drifted the field, billowing,unattached, catching briefly on shocksof broken grass, a raised lip of stone. [End Page 118] Corey Marks Corey Marks is the author of Renunciation (University of Illinois Press, 2000), a National Poetry Series selection, and The Radio Tree (New Issues, 2012), winner of the Green Rose Prize. He teaches poetry at the University of North Texas. Copyright © 2018 Middlebury College Publications